The return of sweetness

Sometime in the last five years, perhaps more, we have seen the emergence of a new trend that says what we want from the world and public personalities, for some purposes, is a certain sweetness.

Once disdained as sentimental, maudlin, mawkish and, when exhibited in public, embarrassing, sweetness is back. Sweetness is big. Sweetness, against all odds, and quite against character, is having a celebrity moment.

Sweetness has a couple of faces. It expresses an openness to the world, a wish to be useful, an innocence, a goodness, a guilelessness, a disinclination to insist on your own interests. If there is a poster girl, it is Jess (Zooey Deschanel), the female lead in the TV show “New Girl.” This program turns out to be a veritable shrine to sweetness, as four roommates rescue one another from the stream of misadventures with madcap enthusiasm and a touching generosity.

Why sweetness? Well, we are coming out of an era of some darkness. We seemed almost to celebrate skepticism and snark. We dwelt upon the grimmest aspects of the human experience. TV and movie making were increasingly ghoulish, with new standards of viscera and depravity. Shows like “CSI” and “NCIS” dwell lovingly on the crime victim. Bright lights and strategically placed towels protect our sexual sensitivities, but everything else on the autopsy table is enthusiastically examined. Once the standard bearer of heartlessness, “The Silence of the Lambs” now looks a little quaint. Since its release, we have seen a succession of werewolves, vampires, serial killers and human monsters of every kind. If you are 40 or under, you’ve grown up on a steady diet of heartlessness.

The darkness trend is obvious even in the world of sports. Boxing used to encourage the conceit that however brutal, the sport was bound by a code of gentlemanly conduct and the Queensberry rules – the so-called sweet science. This world has been supplanted by mixed martial arts, where as I understand it, if you don’t kick the other guy when he’s down, you don’t grasp the opportunity.

The sweetness countertrend explains lots of things in popular culture. For instance, it helps illuminate the ratings crisis at NBC’s “Today Show”, where Matt Lauer stands accused of having pushed out Ann Curry, and Savannah Guthrie stands accused of having failed to replace her in the hearts of America. Ann is genuinely sweet, whereas Matt and Savanaugh are, sometimes, merely mechanically so.

Sweetness used to be optional. For the time being, TV hosts must treat it as obligatory.

(Grant McCracken is a research affiliate at MIT and the author of “Chief Culture Officer.” His most recent book is “Culturematic.”)